We Must Do Something, Even If It Makes Matters Much Worse

And that is why our war in the Middle East is going to start all over again.

I’ve given Obama a lot of credit for his seeming reluctance to involve the US in military conflicts. A McCain or Romney administration, I’m sure, would have had boots on the ground by this point. But the Liberal Interventionists in the administration, such as Susan Rice and Samantha Power, so traumatized by the failure to prevent the Rwandan genocide and as helplessly compelled to view all conflict through the lens of that failure as the previous administration was compelled to view all conflict through the lens of the success of the Cold War, and operating under the doctrine the UN now calls “Responsibility to Protect” but which was once known as the White Man’s Burden, seem to have made a winning case for dipping a toe into the tar pit.

Now that we’ve determined (to “a high level of confidence”) that Bashar al-Assad has used sarin gas several times over the past year, we’re going to fix it by handing out guns to the “moderate” rebels. It’s a slam dunk. I wonder, if we offered chemical weapons to the rebels, whether they would use them. I suspect they would.

Rebel General Idris: “Give me 200 antitank missiles, 100 antiaircraft weapons, and half a million bullets so that the killing can stop.”

Now that we’ve selected our proxy (an incoherent faction within an even more incoherent faction), it will be that much more difficult to resist the pressure of calls for escalation when half-measures inevitably fail. Those half-measures will turn into full-measures, and the civil war that perhaps Assad could have cruelly won will be invigorated now that his opposition has a high level of confidence in US support. We will prolong the suffering and provide a whole new set of motivations for men to kill other men in the region.

In “Nonviolence and Peacemaking Today” (1997), an essay in which Michael Nagler endeavored to establish the concept of peace as an activity and not merely as the absence of an activity, “violence is [defined as] a failure to perceive the living web of unity that binds attacker and victim.” Violence, more than the application of brute force, is a form of blindness. What can restore our sight?

What's next in Egypt? (also, What's the Use of Critical Thinking?)

[I know I haven't posted since early last summer, but I thought I’d share something I posted today on the private blog I maintain for one of my classes.  The class is freshman composition, and lately they’ve been reading about nonviolent resistance, Gandhi and MLK Jr.]

After 18 days of protests, the man who has sat as Egypt's head of state since 1981 (the year I was born) and whose administration has withstood even violent terrorist-style attacks, Hosni Mubarak, has resigned, following the recent example of Tunisia's former President, Ben Ali.  A transitional government is now left in the hands of the Supreme Military Council, an institution that perhaps would not have followed an order to shoot on the crowds even if Mubarak had given it.

A famous photograph was taken in the celebratory aftermath of another, perhaps similar, revolution when massive protests and violence led Romania's military to overthow Ceausescu's* communist administration in the last days of 1989.  The photograph (pictured to the right) is of the Romanian flag against the sky, with the red communist star in the center cut out.  Slavoj Zizek, the well-known Slovenian philosopher, says about the photograph that:

It is difficult to imagine a more salient index of the "open" character of a historical situation "in its becoming." 

Translation: the communist star represented the thing that imposed both meaning and order on human social existence in Romania (something Zizek calls the "Master Signifier"), and the hole left over represents both the exciting and terrifying possibility of meaning and order that now takes it's place.

Zizek further asserts that:

the duty of the critical intellectual...is precisely to occupy all the time...the place of this hole...  philosophy begins the moment we do not simply accept what exists as given ("It's like that!", "Law is law!" etc), but raise the question of how is what we encounter as actual also possible.  What characterizes philosophy is this "step back" from actuality into possibility... (Tarrying with the Negative 2)

These words return to my memory as I ponder what possibilities lie in wait for the people of Egypt.

But even more than that, I think of the various reasons why we're doing what we're doing in class...  Obviously the basic purpose of the course is to teach you how to write for college professors.  My job is to give you all the writing and structuring tools you need to make college writing as easy and painless as possible.  But the grander purpose of non-vocational, liberal arts and humanities courses is to prepare us to be critical thinkers (or "critical intellectuals," as Zizek says).  Do you agree with his assessment of the "duty of the critical intellectual?"  What do you think is the purpose of critical thinking?  What do you think is our duty as developing intellectuals?

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*Interesting social media sidenote: During the last speech of Egypt's former president Hosni Mubarak yesterday, the hashtag #Ceausescu started trending on Twitter, entering top 10.